Photography involves capturing an image of a physical object or scenery. A photograph, which may be digital or chemical in nature, reproduces visual elements visible in the photographed physical object or scenery, for future reference or recollection. Photographs may be printed on paper, which facilitates storage of the images for very long periods of time, or photographs may be stored digitally on hard drives or cloud services, which facilitates easy storage and retrieval of large quantities of photographs.
Maps record geographical or urban features of a landscape, and can be conveniently printed on paper which may be folded to a compact size for easy portability and reference. By consulting a map a person is enabled to discover aspects of her surroundings that may not be obvious by surveying the surroundings visually. Examples of such aspects may include elevation, nearby buildings, nearby streets, public transport connections and municipal or international borders.
Augmented reality comprises that a digital photograph, or live digital video, is furnished with supplementary information that relates to subjects visible in the digital photograph or video. For example, a street view may be furnished with information pointing out interesting architectural aspects of buildings visible in the street view. As another example, a view may be furnished with information on nearby restaurants and directions to reach them.
Augmented reality may be implemented, for example, in a smartphone platform. Such an implementation may work based on a camera on the back of the smartphone, the smartphone being configured to capture a video image of a user's surroundings using the camera and to display it live on a screen disposed in the smartphone on an opposite side with respect to the camera. The user can then pan around and see her surroundings displayed live on the screen. The smartphone may then add to the image on the screen the aforementioned supplementary information to produce the augmented reality view that comprises both the video feed, and overlaid on top of it the supplementary information arranged in a suitable graphical presentation. The user may select which type of supplementary information the smartphone should add, for example in case the user wants to find nearby museums, she can select only museum-related supplementary information to be added to the live depiction of her surroundings.